


May Bear the Scar of You

by the_rck



Category: Chronicles of Amber - Roger Zelazny
Genre: Blood Magic, Dysfunctional Family, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Lima Syndrome, Metaphysics, Non-Explicit Torture, Stockholm Syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-16 09:50:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18689086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_rck/pseuds/the_rck
Summary: It was probably always going to be Martin. The Trump with a dagger through it was a lie, though. I expect that the old man thought it would be more dramatic that way, more likely to get Corwin to see me as a serious threat.Not that I wasn't. Not that I hadn't hurt Martin. I just hadn't been that fucking stupid about it. What I'd done was worse, but Corwin wouldn't have seen it that way. Most of my siblings wouldn't understand that because none of them really remembered being seventeen.





	May Bear the Scar of You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Serenade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serenade/gifts).



> Title from Sara Teasdale's "Blue Squills."
> 
> Thanks to my beta readers, Gammarad and Merfilly.

**Brand**  
I started with a single drop of blood, of course, taken from one of my brothers by trickery. Amber had occasional fads for offering one's own blood to the Unicorn and for augury via patterns of one's own blood droplets. Making sure that the fad came back as often as needed wasn't easy, but it also wasn't particularly hard.

Dad liked reminding people that the blood of his blood was different, more potent. Nobody but me-- and Fiona and Bleys, of course-- seemed to notice that he never shed his own blood for those shows.

I started with a drop because there was no point in gutting someone on the Pattern if all that happened was a sticky, smelly mess. There was also the matter of area of effect. Would a single drop destroy a square inch or a square foot or just as much it covered directly? What other factors came into play?

I spent some time, too, figuring out the best way to get full coverage. The Pattern's not small, and I didn't know what would happen if there were scraps of it left intact. I didn't want to leave, say, half a dozen fragments the size of my fingertip; that might be enough for Dad-- or the rest of the family-- to use against me.

Dried blood did nothing but burn, and the longer a bit of blood had been stored, the less effective it was. Apart from an oddity with Corwin, there was, so far as I could tell, no variation in effect based on which of my siblings had 'donated' the blood.

But pain, physical and emotional, mattered. It made the damage deeper, created more and darker echoes in Shadow. That was the point at which Dad noticed that something was wrong, the point at which I realized that the siblings who were easy to find weren't going to be useful to me.

So I needed a victim.

Corwin would have been perfect because I could have blamed Eric, but Corwin's blood was inert. The power of the Pattern was clearly there, but the Primal Pattern simply ignored his blood in a way that it didn't ignore anyone else's. Blood from people outside Oberon's line simply flashed past ash to dust so fine that it never settled.

Corwin's blood touched the Pattern and vanished into the lines. Nothing changed, nothing at all. If I'd only been researching, I'd have done a lot more with Corwin. As it was, I passed on to other candidates.

It was probably always going to be Martin. The Trump with a dagger through it was a lie, though. I expect that the old man thought it would be more dramatic that way, more likely to get Corwin to see me as a serious threat.

Not that I wasn't. Not that I hadn't hurt Martin. I just hadn't been that fucking stupid about it. What I'd done was worse, but Corwin wouldn't have seen it that way. Most of my siblings wouldn't understand that because none of them really remembered being seventeen. 

Random and Florimel might have remembered being too weak to protect themselves and having to trust the rest of us not to be assholes, but they both had an advantage over Martin in that respect-- Neither of them had been isolated from the rest of us as he had been. I don't think they had illusions about our family by the time they were old enough to try the Pattern.

Martin, though... 'Vulnerable' was an understatement. Llewella was the only one who thought he might need babysitting, and he went to great lengths not to let her find him. Avoiding her meant that he had two likely options for learning how to walk in Shadow.

Gerard would have been a safer choice than Benedict. Gerard as teacher would have led to a slower exploration that started from places known to the rest of the family, places where Martin would have met the rest of the family and heard gossip about the rest of the family.

Benedict was much more a believer in strength through adversity, through risks taken and survived. I think that may have been because he'd seen too many of us die over the centuries. He'd had to learn to let us do stupid shit because the only alternative was trying to prevent us from doing anything at all.

And Benedict didn't take sides when we were doing stupid shit to each other. I'm not sure he realized how much younger Martin was than the rest of us. Anyone younger than Deirdre was always going to look like a child to him.

Fiona was the one who actually snared the boy. Possibly Bleys helped, but neither asked me to assist beyond gathering gossip. From what Martin said later, she invited him to visit us in order to learn some things that Benedict couldn't teach him and so that I could make Trumps of him. She wasn't actually lying, but I don't think he was glad of most of the lessons.

I was pursuing an alternate victim. Dalt could have disappeared with even less fuss than Martin. Dalt knew he was being hunted, but he assumed that Bleys was after him to finish the last vestiges of Deela's power, so he wasn't running from the actual threat. We'd also kept Dalt from the Pattern, so he had fewer avenues of escape.

Fiona thought that it would be interesting to know whether blood from someone with the potential to walk the Pattern would work as well as blood from someone who actually had. She was entirely correct that it was an interesting question. I think she also hoped that we could avoid the risks that would come with using Martin.

There were any number of things we might choose to do to Martin that Benedict would never forgive.

I didn't expect either Martin or Dalt to become real to me. I should have remembered that I was vulnerable, too.

Dalt was feral. He'd take anything as long as it came with steady meals, a place to sleep, and a promise of revenge. He didn't even require a believable promise of revenge. If we didn't deliver on that it, he'd just savage us once he no longer needed us in order to survive.

I knew what to do with Dalt. I didn't want to bother, but I knew, so I asked Jasra to take him in hand. We both pretended that she'd never even seen the borders of want, but we both also knew that she'd scraped and scrabbled and starved at various points before we met. Jasra and Dalt recognized that about each other. 

Dalt wasn't nearly as ruthless as Jasra, but he could respect the success of her survival strategy and copy it. He knew that we didn't need to threaten him because he wouldn't survive without us. He missed the fact that his life might have unique value to anyone else.

He traded blood and suffering for alliance and was, so far as I could tell, happy with the results. I suppose it helped that the Pattern spat his blood back at me. I think he'd have been less happy if we'd bled him repeatedly.

Then again, Dalt adored Rinaldo. He understood the why of my choices on a very visceral level.

Fiona offered Martin lessons in creating Trump to tempt him into our workspace. She then passed responsibility for him to me with the excuse that my research was more broadly applicable across Shadow. As I was studying Trump in depth while she was looking for ways to predict changes in physical laws from one Shadow to the next, her claim was true only from certain angles.

"It's more that her research is, ah, esoteric," I told Martin as my sister walked away. "It _could_ be broadly applicable. Eventually. Possibly."

I studied him as I spoke. He had a polite half smile that I thought meant friendliness without actual commitment to liking me and a sort of vague attentiveness that gave me the impression that he would remember every word just long enough to sort out which bits mattered to him.

He looked a lot like Dad, not so much in features-- those came from Paulette and Morganthe-- as in mannerisms.

I wondered if Dad had looked like that during his first years as King. I made a sweeping gesture to indicate that Martin was welcome to look around my laboratory space. I assumed-- correctly-- that he'd recognize the active Trump and bits of magic and avoid touching them, but I watched carefully anyway because Fiona would poison me every day for years if I damaged Martin right then.

After almost ten minutes of wandering the galleries, Martin turned to look at me. "You'll really explain all of this?" He sounded younger and more hopeful than I'd expected.

I laughed. "The parts I understand. Most of this is about asking questions without certainty about what will happen. Performing tests with established outcomes serves best for calibrating equipment and for learning how to design a study that will yield usable data."

His eyes narrowed. Now, he no longer reminded me quite so much of Dad. He reminded me of Moire at diplomatic occasions when she couldn't avoid negotiating directly with Dad.

Moire usually got more than Dad meant to give because she'd let go of an immediate contest for a better position in one that was months or years in the future. She always had just enough control over resources and logistics to be able to turn any large undertaking into a complete shit show.

I revised my ideas about how I would keep the boy occupied. He wasn't as naive as I'd thought, just still naive enough to think that his grandmother's protection extended anywhere outside of the Golden Circle.

I started him with the selection and proper care of brushes. I taught him to read non-representational forms of art and explained that making Trumps look like their targets was mainly a convention meant to make it easier for the artistically illiterate to use the Trumps. "If it has my face on it, nobody misses that it's me. A picture of a salamander or bouquet of flowers would work equally well if the user had a mental connection with that as a symbol for me."

"Better security," he said, "but then people look at them and start to know how you think." He hesitated and shook his head. "How you, the artist, think, I mean. You're not talking about the symbols only working if the person making contact understands them."

It hadn't quite been a question, but I nodded anyway. "The magic that connects to the recipient comes from the artist, so it's the artist's views of the recipient that channel the power."

He frowned. "If the artist's conception of the recipient changes radically, do previously made Trumps stop working?"

That question made Martin interesting. It was not a thing I'd thought to ask. Or to test. I wrote myself a note about it then said, "I don't know of a case when it happened, but we have a very limited sample size."

That diverted us into a discussion of what 'sample size' meant and of how to design an experiment that limited variables enough to yield reliable results. Martin had pretty clearly never been exposed to efficient and meticulous experimentation as an approach to magic, and he seemed to find it fascinating.

I wondered if I would have the same conversations with my son or any of my other, as yet theoretical, children. I liked the idea of that better than the idea that Martin trusted me. I would never leave a child of mine as vulnerable as Martin was.

I only realized years later that those comments about the artist's perceptions and imagery were Martin telling me that I'd given him the clues he needed to guess that all of the exits were barred against him. He'd gotten there from how I had drawn the family members he'd met-- Llewella, Gerard, Benedict, and Fiona.

Possibly Dad might have gotten as much from as little, but I don't think anyone else in the family would have.

"Don't have children," I told Martin, later, as I taught him how to mix blood with his pigments to make his Trumps better able to breach the barriers between Shadows. "This takes a little of you, something you'll get back later, but the Pattern--" I hesitated and looked away, trying to pretend the speech wasn't entirely scripted.

"Yes?"

I could hear him breathing, but I couldn't hear any of the small sounds that went with movement. "Some of my siblings may have told you-- It's not that our family never has children." I waited for a response.

After a silence that stretched a little too long, Martin said, "Aunt Llewella said your father kills 'the weak ones.'"

I forced a laugh and was pleased that it sounded utterly lacking in humor. "He kills the vulnerable ones, and most babies are vulnerable. He needs to feed the Pattern." I didn't let myself look at Martin to see how he was reacting. "If he can't convince us that there have never been others, he'd rather we think he's culling the weak."

"Why?" The question was more gentle than panicked.

I had expected Martin to be afraid. I had planned my words to answer fear. My hand tightened on the handle of my paintbrush until it cracked and splintered. I let the now useless implement drop to the floor. "Because the Pattern is-- Have you ever played jackstraws?" I glanced at him.

He frowned. "Once or twice. The game relies on chaos."

"It's a metaphor. Go with it." I couldn't tell if he believed me. "Imagine throwing the straws to start the game and having them-- entirely by chance-- fall in a way that makes a useful structure, one with some redundancies but without foundation or--" I shook my head and made a sharp chopping gesture with the hand that had held the brush. "You can't remove so much as a straw without risk of the whole thing collapsing, and 'useful' actually means life saving and then power having. Then one or two of the straws start to disintegrate. You can replace them, but that means needing more straws, and there are always one or two more showing signs of decay. If it falls apart, you will be vulnerable. Throwing the straws again might or might not save you."

Martin had gone very still again. "I can imagine that," he said. He looked older than he could possibly be. I didn't recognize it then, but he looked at me the way that Benedict has always looked at the rest of us-- as if he couldn't save everyone and was weighing his options, as if he understood the costs of each choice.

I don't know why Martin, out of all of us, should have learned that lesson. Benedict didn't manage to get it through to anyone else.

"My grandfather-- your great-grandfather-- made the Pattern with his own blood. It continues to need blood, so Oberon feeds it his children and grandchildren."

Martin's breath hissed audibly through his teeth.

"Not us," I told him. I let my tone tell him that I knew it was little consolation. "It needs the _potential_ to use Pattern without the actual imprint. We're safe once we actually walk it." That I hadn't yet lied about the Pattern and my intentions towards it helped me meet his eyes.

The expression there told me that no one had warned him. He was wondering, then, what else everyone had failed to tell him and why.

He gave me a measuring look and nodded. 

I didn't see our mutual relatives in that. I saw Moire, and I saw the sea. I ignored the chill that lanced its way up my spine. There was nothing Martin could do, nothing at all.

His lips pressed together and flattened into a razor thin line.

"I have a son," I told him.

Martin nodded again.

****

 **Martin**  
I expected to die. I knew I was doomed when Uncle Brand mentioned his son. I considered asking him if he'd do as much for a daughter. Given his age, he'd likely had other children.

Possibly he hadn't realized that they existed before or that they were his.

Grandmother and Aunt Llewella had put a lot of emphasis on contraception when they discussed certain topics with me. I had thought it was simply that they didn't want me to emulate my asshole father. That had been humiliating because I'd tried very hard not to be Prince Random of Amber.

Vialle had told me about Oberon killing the weak ones. Aunt Llewella had told her as a warning. Neither Vialle nor I had realized that it might mean this.

This was the reason that Grandmother had reminded me, repeatedly, that Rebma's depths could offer sanctuary to anyone she favored. Then she'd let me go because I needed to learn ice and drought and flood. She also hadn't said that.

Again, Vialle had. She had passed Aunt Llewella's warning to me.

I should have remembered that Vialle disagreed with Grandmother and Aunt Llewella about what I needed to know. Vialle was my aunt, too, but not known or acknowledged.

She could be lured from Rebma by my need.

Vialle would be more vulnerable than I was now if she left Rebma, in spite of being much older than I, older than my mother, even, because she'd walked the Pattern after I did. Her doing it needed me and Aunt Llewella, one before and one after, to make sure she didn't lose the lines.

Grandmother didn't know. Uncle Brand must not find out.

And, really, he already had me. A bird in the hand and all of that. I certainly wasn't powerful enough to break the Shadow and evade him after. That was the whole point of choosing me.

I'd thought Aunt Fiona wanted the Prince of Rebma. I should have remembered that Aunt Llewella and Vialle always insisted that Amber didn't see Rebma, not really, but Uncle Gerard had always seen me as my grandmother's heir rather than as his brother's bastard.

I fought Clarissa's children the first time they took my blood and many times after. I also tried other, subtler methods for escape. Nothing worked, not quickly. Some of the slower techniques might have worked eventually, but--

A trickle of water takes a very long time to create a canyon. Possibly, if I'd tried something while we were all pretending that I was their guest, I might have managed. I had almost a month of that. I could have started something, but I was curious. I wanted to learn.

Brand explained that the pain was necessary. They'd tested it, he said. He looked genuinely regretful about the fact of it, and I didn't doubt that pain made whatever-the-hell they were actually doing easier.

Not one of the three of them was doing it for kicks.

Brand used electricity, mostly, both technologically controlled and magically controlled. Fiona used poisons. Bleys just beat me.

I didn't see Bleys very often. I'm almost certain that it's because what he did was less efficient than what the others did. Possibly he simply had other things to do. Almost certainly, he thought that destroying the Pattern was less important than dealing with Oberon. He thought that I'd still be available whenever he got to the Pattern destroying part.

Bleys probably slept better when he forgot I even existed.

From what Fiona said, Bleys wasn't entirely wrong on his priorities. Oberon was trying to answer their attacks on the integrity of the Pattern, and he repaired some bits of minor damage. Fiona would tell me about the war, about family treachery and the older, darker things in the Courts of Chaos. It was a kindness of sorts, as much as she was capable of. She thought I'd want to know how fast my time was evaporating. She thought that honesty might ease things.

I suppose she wanted both of us to remember how small I was.

Brand talked of history and metaphysical theory and poetry and anything at all that avoided the topic of after. The only topics of now that he'd touch were his wife, his foster son, and his son. I loathed all three of them, the people who weighed enough in his regard to justify my... everything, but I also chased after scraps of stories about them because his care for them gave me hope.

Brand and Fiona both watched me carefully while I screamed and tried to break the straps that held me to the table. Several times, they each stopped and recalibrated when they decided that what they were doing might kill me.

I think I could have protected myself by breaking my ties to the Pattern. I think-- I don't know-- I might have been able to excise the connection in self-preservation. I didn't because I was afraid of who they might try next.

Vialle would have been so very disappointed to learn that I didn't trust her to protect herself as she'd helped protect and teach me. Maybe she'd have done better than I managed. Maybe she'd have died. Maybe--

I never mentioned her. Not even once.

Brand gave me analgesics, after his sessions, and a cold cloth to cover my eyes. He sat with me and held my hand when I still hurt too much to move. He talked about his son and his wife and places he'd traveled as my blood flowed through tubes into storage bags. Often, he did that after my sessions with Fiona, as well.

She made sure I wouldn't sicken or die. She made sure I had physical necessities. She... didn't indulge me.

Brand brought me foods he knew I liked and books and painting supplies. He monitored how much I drank and how much I pissed. He told me that I was doing well, beyond expectations, and that he was proud to know me.

I almost believed him, sometimes.

I still don't know which bits were fucking lies and which were merely fucked up. Meeting more of his siblings, later, only muddied the waters further. It's entirely possible that everything he said and did fell into both categories.

I looked forward to the parts of his visits that had nothing to do with pain. He was the only one to touch me with kindness. I both loathed him for it and would have endured twice as much torture to be sure that he kept giving me that time.

After a while-- Days? Weeks? Not months. Months are beyond the realm of possibility-- after a while, Fiona stopped poisoning me. She took my vitals after a session and told me that Brand's methodology was more effective than hers and likely safer for me in the long term. She smiled at me. "He's hoping Rinaldo grows up to be like you."

As she turned toward the door, I caught an expression on her face that was both harsher and more worried than what had been implied by the smile. I still don't know if she meant me to see it.

Chewing over what that might mean kept me occupied during my helpless loneliness until Brand came ten or twenty or even thirty minutes later. He helped me shower then fed me delicacies from a Shadow that he said Bleys had just found. There was a shellfish that reminded me of a childhood favorite, chewy and a little sweet with enough salt to bite. It's called _belarin_ in Rebma. We use the polished shells for mosaic tiles on the outsides of houses. They hold pigments extremely well, other things, too.

Some of those mosaics are Trumps now. There may be days when my people need deeper ocean. Not this instant. Not even soon. Some day. Those escape routes are a thing I have built.

The city is not so precious as the people within it.

Grandmother likes _belarin_ and always serves the dish when I visit. I haven't brought myself to tell her that even the smell of it makes me sick now. All I get when I eat it is the sense image of Brand offering me another bite, of tears in my eyes, of hands that trembled too much for me eat unaided.

Grandmother still thinks he only stabbed me.

I never quite lost the fear that Brand's kindness was only a path to another way of hurting me. Brand gave me a lot of the not-quite _belarin_ during the rest of my-- of the time we spent together.

"Any restructuring of the current Pattern will still need blood," he told me once, some time in the vague middle of my imprisonment when Fiona only stopped by occasionally to make sure I hadn't found a way to murder her brother. "Not as much but still some. Bleys thinks that's enough of a fix." 

His frown told me that he disagreed, so I asked, "What are the alternatives?"

He wobbled a hand. "The Courts of Chaos will survive. We're not powerful there without the Pattern, but in the worst case, we'd live and create a space for ourselves. We are other things than Pattern. Best case, I get the Jewel of Judgment and make a new Pattern after the last of the Shadows the old one cast flickers out." As he always did when I emptied it, he re-filled my glass of juice.

I didn't much want it, but I drank anyway. It was better than restraints, an IV, and staring at the ceiling of the medical room.

Our compromise was that he no longer poured me anything red.

Brand cared a lot about me not getting dehydrated. He cared a lot about all of the things that would help my body give him more blood.

I, on the other hand, wanted desperately to delay that healing, even if only by seconds.

He wouldn't make me wash, just gave me clean clothing and towels and soap. He mostly assumed that I'd want to after... a session, and he'd get me into the shower and stay to be sure that my spasming legs didn't give out and dump me on the tile again. That time in the shower was horrifyingly intimate in a way that the torture wasn't. 

The aftermath of Fiona's sessions had often involved vomiting, and Brand had usually found me in the bathroom then, almost always on the floor near the toilet. I relied on his assistance because the alternative was so much colder.

Hot water helped loosen the knots from the electrical torture techniques Brand used, so the shower was usually the first stop after those. Massage worked better for releasing the knots altogether. His hands on me that way frightened me in ways that went beyond disturbing, but I couldn't get leverage to work the knots out on my own.

Fiona disapproved of that part particularly. I think she assuming her brother was fucking me. He didn't, but it wasn't because he couldn't have. It wasn't even because I'd have tried to refuse.

I wouldn't have refused because, if he had done that, I'd have found it easier to hate him. It would have made the gentleness of his hands on my calves, thighs, and ass into something that was obviously not about kindness to me. It would have broken me, but I'd have understood it better.

I wanted-- needed-- some part of it to be kindness, so I didn't try to make it sexual or even to let him know that I knew it could be.

Beyond locking me into a magical cage of a room and putting me into some weird magical stasis when he'd be away longer than my body needed for replenishing my blood, Brand didn't dictate what I did with my time alone and awake. I could practice spells if I wished or read or do push-ups. 

If I rejected a particular food, it wouldn't appear on my plate again, not as long as I ate other things. I remained picky about my food because he let me be. I just understood that it was an indulgence, a reward for good behavior. I didn't try to reject eating altogether, not after the one time they put in a feeding tube.

That had taken all three of them, so it would be difficult for any one of them to manage on short notice because the other two had things they needed to do elsewhere. I just understood that that wouldn't protect me; it would only make the feeding tube and restraints permanent parts of my life.

They needed me alive. They needed me to suffer and to bleed, but Brand preferred not to be uncivilized about it. I wouldn't get that from either of the others, not if I was inconvenient. They'd both already decided that I was going to die of this.

During another discussion of what would happen after the Pattern was gone, Brand studied my face then spooned more shellfish onto my plate. "I may have to fight Fiona over who makes the new Pattern." Brand spoke in a tone that made me think he knew my attention had been drifting. He smiled as if he wasn't talking about destroying everyone and everything I'd ever known. "She thinks access to the new Pattern will remain bloodline limited, me and my descendants or her and her descendants." He met my eyes and said, "I'll protect you then, my word on it."

I wanted him to leave so that I could curl up in my bed and cry into my pillow. Most of the time, I could forget that Rebma was doomed. When I remembered, I couldn't breathe. Only years of Grandmother repeating, "Hold what you can. Give the bastards only what they've already taken," helped me in those moments. The depths protect their own.

Brand hadn't ever offered me this protection before, but I could see that he meant it, so I nodded. If he did destroy the Pattern, I would back him over Fiona because of that promised safety. I had no reason to think she'd offer me any protection at all. I just wasn't planning to let either of them get that far.

I ate so that my silence could be excused.

If it got as far as Pattern making, I'd try creating the fucking replacement myself before I let either of them do it. Brand might have taught me enough that I wouldn't botch the job completely. I, at least, knew better than to use blood. 

I might try tears. I knew enough about how to shed those, and they were as much a part of me as the sea. My people would flourish in salt water. I might never have to breathe air again.

They were paranoid enough about my abilities not to let anyone but the three of them enter my cell, but they assumed they knew more about everything than I did. 

They only knew more about most things than I did. It might have been enough. I'll never know.

Not even Fiona-- who I'm certain was watching for it-- ever noticed how close I got to making holes in the magical cage around me. I'd set little rivers of power flowing through the room, aiming at the places where one bit of imprisoning magic cast enough of a shadow over another to conceal erosion. I didn't need to keep feeding it power, so it kept working even when the interior of my prison sat in stasis. The eroding current just needed time passing for the spells it was wearing down, and those spells wouldn't function if they were cut off from everything outside of the cell.

My magic had found cracks in the walls, had filled them, and was starting to freeze and expand when Fiona came into my room, alone. Of my three captors, she was the one I least wanted to see right then.

There was a more than trivial risk that she might notice if the cracking really got going. No, not if-- when. It would happen. I wouldn't survive losing that hope, so I kept it close.

I nodded at her, set down my pen, and waited. I wouldn't stand to offer her courtesy she hadn't earned. Brand wasn't there to protect me from anything she might do to retaliate, but she knew he'd object, after.

Her attention on me was safer at that moment than her attention anywhere else in the room.

She pursed her lips and looked me up and down. "You're not as broken as you should be." She sounded as if that was rudeness on my part but also as if my state of not-broken-enough might be useful to her rather than inconvenient.

I didn't respond. Any response might sacrifice whatever fragments of leverage my usefulness could yield.

"Yes," she said. "Good enough." She pulled out the chair where Brand usually sat, took a seat, and planted her elbows on the table. "He's going too far, you know."

I didn't require an antecedent for that pronoun, so I nodded. "I've thought that for--" I didn't know how long I'd been prisoner. I didn't like thinking about that. "Since the beginning." I hadn't forgotten any bit of her part in those decisions, but this wasn't the time to bring that up. I still needed time to crack the barrier on my cell, and that alone wouldn't get me out of the Shadow. It wouldn't guarantee escape.

"He's my brother," she said, "and I understand why he's in a hurry, but he doesn't have any sort of plan that doesn't involve everything outside the Courts of Chaos dying."

I hesitated. "I thought that was _your_ plan, too." That might have been too blunt, but I wanted whatever this was done quickly.

She made an abrupt chopping motion with one hand. "There are other factors, ones I've recently discovered. There's also... Bleys; he's my brother, too. Brand doesn't think anything matters but the Pattern, thinks we can work around all of the problems." She paused, and I was almost certain she was trying to see what effect her words had had.

I raised my eyebrows. "And you're telling me because--?" I was a tool for her, not an enemy or an ally.

"We imprisoned our father a while ago," she said. "We need you to let him out." She sounded as if the words tasted bad. "You can tell him about all of this--" She waved at the room in general with just a little extra emphasis on the door to the medical room. "Better that you do, even. He won't kill you or even hurt you for being messenger, but he would-- Well, yes."

I suspected that she had done worse than imprison her father. "Just like that?" I wasn't saying no. I wouldn't say no. My options were not that plentiful.

I just might be lying when I said yes; she had to know that.

"Just like that," she agreed. "You'll have to go to the Courts, and you'll have to know a few things before you do. There's time. Brand won't be back before you leave. He and Bleys are--" She shrugged. "They're pursuing... diverging... goals. I'll tell you that part."

She'd tell me so that I could tell Oberon.

I wasn't supposed to notice that every word might be a lie or to fill in all the things she wasn't saying. I was supposed to be too young and too traumatized to have my own plans.

All three of them underestimated me on that front, too.

****

 **Brand**  
Finessing the confrontation at the edge of the Abyss was going to be the hard part. I had everyone there but Gerard, and I regretted him. Dalt could manage Oberon and the destruction of the Pattern, but asking him to kidnap Gerard on top of it would simply doom both of them.

I valued Dalt more than I valued Gerard. Jasra's likely opinion was part of it, but mostly I didn't want to lose Dalt.

Gerard would have understood.

I'd originally only meant for Dalt to kill Oberon. Destroying the Pattern was a thing that I could have delayed a little with the old man gone. It had been a compromise with Fiona and Bleys when I decided that using Martin wasn't-- 

Martin shouldn't have mattered that much to me. I'd decided that he wouldn't, and he shouldn't have. I'd chosen a small circle of people who mattered and deliberately taken a course that would obliterate the rest. Martin was never supposed to have a place inside.

Killing our father bought time for me to figure out the next steps because Bleys and Fiona were more eager to have him dead than they were to destroy the abomination.

"It will be easier," Fiona had said, "if we're not fighting him and the rest of the family and everyone in the Courts. One battle at a time."

Bleys had frowned at her because he didn't like remembering that she considered this war, that neither he nor I would have survived to walk the Pattern if she hadn't understood the danger. Our sister had been fighting much longer and more viciously than Bleys or I could manage.

At any rate, Corwin having made a Pattern changed things. It gave me life support for the multiverse until I could make something to sustain everything properly. In a way, he was proof of concept. If he could make a Pattern without blood, I certainly could, so I'd told Dalt to destroy Dworkin's Pattern while Oberon was too weak to protect it.

Corwin's Pattern did explain a lot about Corwin's blood and its lack of interaction with the original Pattern. There must have been some sort of primal, temporal echoes that connected him to both versions through whatever part of himself he'd used to make a new Pattern.

Caine's arrow hit me just as I was thinking that Fiona was probably going to gut me for changing Dalt's mission. Pain and blood filled my throat, and I thought that Martin must have felt something like this, over and over and over. 

Then Deirdre and I were in the Abyss, and it no longer mattered that I couldn't breathe.

Deirdre grabbed the Jewel.

I considered-- very distantly-- releasing it to her because, even without attunement, she might be able to use it to survive. I was dying.

Caine had put every lethal thing he knew into that arrow, and he'd hit me squarely in the throat. It was more wonder that I wasn't dead yet than that I was going to die.

I let go of the chain. I'm not certain it was by choice. I'm not certain it wasn't.

Then, the Unicorn was there, and she took the Jewel, and she took us. She ran as if there were solid ground under her hooves. Eventually, she dropped us.

I... may have lost time then. I may actually have died. 

When I came back to myself, Deirdre was about five yards away and puking up everything she'd ever eaten.

I choked because my body really wanted to do the same thing but couldn't because my throat was filled with blood and an arrow.

I definitely lost time then. My next waking smelled of antiseptic chemicals and felt like all the best pain killers. I must have twitched because Martin's face was suddenly looking down at mine.

"You lived the first time," he said, "because you were too tangled with Deirdre for the Unicorn to leave you behind. You lived the second time because the Unicorn gave your life to me and gave me time to get you here." He looked tired enough that I suspected there had been a third and fourth time, at the very least.

I blinked at him. My vocal cords weren't cooperating.

"I don't want to see you again," he told me. "Go back to Jasra and Rinaldo. You don't--" He hesitated. "The Unicorn said that the Pattern no longer needs blood. You gave her opportunity, you and Fiona and Bleys, and she took care of it. She'll remember. She'll also remember every second I spent with you."

I blinked again because that implied that the Unicorn _knew_ every second. I knew what our grandmother was, and none of it included omniscience. There couldn't have been time while I was dying, and I couldn't think of either reason or occasion for Martin to have confided in her before.

Martin stayed until I was well enough to shift Shadow. "Fiona only let me out because you had a plan that required it," he said then rather than saying goodbye. "I misjudged her motives once but not after that."

I shrugged. I still couldn't talk, and I doubt he wanted my words anyway.

"I didn't tell Oberon that part." He turned and started to walk away. "He didn't need to know. Just remember-- It was a _choice_. I could have made a different one." He didn't even glance at me as he spoke. 

I did not go back to Amber.

****

 **Martin**  
I needed a long time to recover after meeting Brand, but it wasn't because I'd been gut stabbed. That would have been easier. There wouldn't be any part of it that I wanted to keep.

I wouldn't know that Brand was genuinely capable of kindness. I wouldn't know that he loved me or that his love for me had been enough to change his plans. That, combined with what he actually did, was worse than any knife would have been.

I loathe Fiona, and I won't so much as share a drink with Bleys. Ever. I can work-- have already worked-- with both. I just watch for ways to make them unnecessary enough that I can kill them. Maybe centuries will change that, but I suspect not.

Rinaldo-- I never met him and don't want to, but Rebma will welcome him if he ever asks. No blood, no pain, no demands, as long as he doesn't betray us. 

None of Oberon's land-born children could touch him there. I will do that much for his father's sake.


End file.
